AI Coding Plans Ranked (August 2026): From Free to $200, a Winner at Every Tier
September update: Both Claude's and Codex's quotas changed in September, and Opus 5.5 shipped too. For the latest, see: Claude vs. Codex Quota War (September 2026).
On August 16, a user on Reddit's r/codex reported that their weekly Codex quota had been cut roughly in half overnight. The third-party tracker NerfTrack estimated the API-equivalent value dropped from about $160 to $80 (XenoSpectrum, reporting on the 2026-08-16 incident). That's a community report plus a third-party estimate. As of August 21, OpenAI has neither confirmed nor denied it.
I'm paying for two of these companies myself right now, so news like that spikes my blood pressure. This piece lays out every one of the 20-odd plans on the market as of August 2026, tier by tier, so you can decide for yourself. You don't need to write a line of code to follow along. Every tier has something for regular people too.
This whole article has one thesis, so let's get it out of the way first: Benchmarks are the ceiling; quota is your daily life — and never marry one vendor.
How I score this, and why you should believe me
Full disclosure up front: I personally pay a monthly subscription to both Claude and ChatGPT, and this very site was built with Claude Code. So yes, I have a soft spot for both, and a grudge against both too.
Official pricing pages are my baseline for data. Beyond that I lean heavily on third-party trackers built specifically for coding plans, like codingplan.org (updated 2026-08-19), plus Reddit, since vendors never volunteer the fact that they quietly cut your quota; only the community does.
When it comes to which model's actually stronger, I only trust one judge: Artificial Analysis benchmarks. If this article ever says flatly that one model beats another, that's where the claim comes from. Everything else (other review sites, vendor self-promotion, community chatter) is opinion, not fact.
One more heads-up: every vendor measures quota differently (credits, prompts, messages, flat dollars), and none of it converts cleanly from one vendor to the next. Don't try to do that math in your head; just compare within a vendor, not across them.
Most vendors here bill in US dollars at whatever the exchange rate happens to be on the day your card gets charged (Kimi and Qwen are the Chinese-vendor exceptions, pricing their plans in yuan), so the figures in brackets are a rough conversion (rate of 2026-08-22, US$1 ≈ €0.86, via exchangerate-api). They're there to give you a feel, not official local pricing.
Free tier ($0): squeeze the free stuff dry first
| Company | Plan (monthly) | Quota | Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | ChatGPT Free ($0) | Has Codex, but a tiny quota | Free taste of agentic coding | Just enough to sample |
| Anthropic | Claude Free ($0) | Quota on the thin side | Quality is good | Hits the ceiling after a few messages |
| Gemini Free ($0) | ~30 messages/day (2026-03 data) | Well-regarded answer quality; paste a YouTube link for an instant summary | Quota isn't generous | |
| DeepSeek | App/Web ($0) | No official usage cap, though peak hours bring frequent 429/503 throttling; runs V4 Pro and V4 Flash (GA 2026-08-13) | Free access to a flagship-class model, 1M context, decent app | Chinese company: data stored offshore, your input may be used for training |
| GitHub Copilot | Free ($0) | 2,000 completions/month | Enough completions for daily use | Completions are the only thing worth bragging about |
| opencode | + local Ollama ($0) | Unlimited | Offline, your code never leaves the machine | Needs 16GB+ RAM, quality isn't flagship |
| Cursor | Hobby ($0) | Entry-level quota | Free taste of the IDE | Quota is tiny |
| Windsurf | Free ($0) | Entry-level quota | Free to try | Quota is tiny |
| Kiro | Free ($0) | 50 credits | Free to try | Quota is tiny |
| Trae | Free ($0) | Entry-level quota | Free to try | Locked to the Trae IDE |
| Augment | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| GLM (Zhipu) | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| MiniMax | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Kimi | Adagio ($0) | K2.7/K2 | Good at long Chinese-language documents | Flagship K3 costs extra |
| Qwen (Alibaba) | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
The free tier is currently ruled by two monsters. First, DeepSeek: the official app is free, with no fixed usage cap (though it throttles hard at peak hours), and runs V4 Pro and V4 Flash, models that only went GA on August 13. Nothing else at this price touches that. My honest take: it holds its own against flagship models, and on some tasks it beats models in the GPT-5.5 class (that's my opinion plus community sentiment, not an Artificial Analysis number). The cost is worth spelling out too: it's a Chinese company, your data sits on servers outside your country, and whatever you type may end up as training material. Fine for recipe questions or trip planning. Keep your company files and anything personal away from it. The second monster is Gemini: answer quality is consistently solid, and it has one trick no other free tier offers: paste a YouTube link and it spits out a summary. A two-hour keynote becomes a bullet list.
For this tier, raw model strength goes to DeepSeek, and features-and-integration goes to Gemini. If you mostly code and own a decent machine, local opencode + Ollama + Qwen3-Coder covers you. Don't want anything leaving your machine at all? Same answer.
$3–18: Chinese vendors turned the budget tier into a bloodbath
| Company | Plan (monthly) | Quota | Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | ChatGPT Go ($8 · ~€7) | Full agentic features | Big-lab quality at a floor-level price | Smaller quota than Plus |
| Anthropic | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | |
| DeepSeek | n/a (the free tier already covers it) | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| GitHub Copilot | Pro ($10 · ~€9) | $15 in credits; completions never touch the credit balance | Unlimited completions, native to GitHub | Agentic features do eat credits |
| opencode | Go ($10, $5 first month · ~€9) | $12/5h, $30/week, $60/month | One subscription covers 18 open-source models, quota priced transparently | Open-source models, not flagship-tier |
| Cursor | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Windsurf | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Kiro | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Trae | Lite ($3 · ~€3) / Pro ($10) | Entry to mid-level quota | Cheapest option in an already-cheap tier | Locked to the Trae IDE |
| Augment | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| GLM (Zhipu) | Lite ($18, $12.6 if billed annually · ~€15) | 10,000 credits/week | Reviews call it near-flagship at a tenth of the price (opinion) | Peak-hour speed, data-residency concerns |
| MiniMax | Starter ($10 · ~€9) | 100 prompts/5h | M2.7 is fast | Quota runs small |
| Kimi | Andante (¥49 ≈ $7 · ~€6) | 300–1,200 messages/5h | Chinese-language strength, long context | Flagship K3 needs a higher tier |
| Qwen (Alibaba) | Lite (¥39 ≈ $5.5 · ~€5) | 700 credits/5h | Cheap early-bird pricing | Free CLI got killed without warning (2026-04-15); rules keep shifting |
This is 2026's most interesting battlefield: Chinese vendors (GLM, MiniMax, Kimi, Qwen) are matching near-flagship capability at a tenth of the price, and it's forcing US vendors to invent price points that never existed before, like ChatGPT Go. For coders, opencode Go is the best-designed product at this tier: it prices its quota in actual dollars, $12 per 5 hours, a rare kind of honesty. Compare that to the big labs quietly adjusting quotas on a whim, and I'll take the transparency every time.
Two winners here: coders get opencode Go, everyone else gets ChatGPT Go. Want a cheap model plugged into Claude Code? GLM Lite has an OpenAI-compatible endpoint you can point Claude Code at. And before you run a company project through any Chinese vendor, confirm your data is even allowed to leave the country first.
$20: the main battlefield, and the winner isn't who you'd guess
| Company | Plan (monthly) | Quota | Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | ChatGPT Plus ($20 · ~€17) | Instant ~160 msgs/3h, Thinking 3,000 msgs/week (measured 2026-08-04; officially subject to fluctuation) | Nothing at this price beats the chat volume; full multimodal | Codex quota under a shrinkage cloud since 8/16 (community-reported, unconfirmed) |
| Anthropic | Claude Pro ($20 · ~€17) | 5-hour session + weekly cap; +50% through 8/31 | Claude Code tops multiple review rankings | Chat quota is a full tier below Plus's |
| Gemini AI Pro ($19.99 · ~€17) | CLI 1,500 requests/day | 1M-token context is unmatched | CLI ecosystem mid-transition (2026-06-18) | |
| DeepSeek | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| GitHub Copilot | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| opencode | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Cursor | Pro ($20 · ~€17) | Fixed usage, then metered overage | Good IDE experience | Rewrote its billing model three times in 2026 |
| Windsurf | Pro ($20 · ~€17) | Fixed usage | Smooth IDE integration | Frequent renaming (Devin Desktop) and repricing |
| Kiro | Pro ($20 · ~€17) | Fixed credits | Spec-driven development is an interesting idea | Pricing was criticized by The Register (2025-08) |
| Trae | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Augment | Indie ($20 · ~€17) | 40,000 credits | Indexes large codebases well | Small community |
| GLM (Zhipu) | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| MiniMax | Plus ($20 · ~€17) | 300 prompts/5h | High volume, fast | Model isn't top-tier |
| Kimi | Moderato (¥99 ≈ $14 · ~€12) | Mid-level quota, unlocks flagship K3 | Cheap way into K3 | Ecosystem skews toward Chinese-language users |
| Qwen (Alibaba) | Standard (¥139 ≈ $19.5 · ~€17) | 3,000 credits/5h | Generous quota | Same as above: a history of shifting rules |
Engineers will tell you Claude Pro has the best quality, and plenty of reviews rank it that way. But I'm giving this tier's crown to ChatGPT Plus, for two reasons. First: 3,000 Thinking messages a week. From everything public I could find, no other $20 plan touches that volume, and for someone who asks AI about everything, that's the gap between all-you-can-eat and a limited set menu. Second, how I actually use it: I connect a GitHub repo to ChatGPT and burn chat quota reading code and talking through changes. One catch worth knowing: the GitHub connector is read-only, so actually editing a file still means going back to Codex and spending Codex quota. Cheap chat quota for thinking, expensive Codex quota only for the actual edit: that split saves the most. The August 16 shrinkage scare is still a cloud over this plan, so I pay monthly and watch it closely rather than jumping to annual billing.
If you mostly code, flip my call: spend 90% of your time in a terminal, and Claude Pro is the better deal. Care about volume more than quality? MiniMax Plus's 300 prompts/5h looks best on paper.
$30–100: heavy-user territory
| Company | Plan (monthly) | Quota | Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | Pro ($100 · ~€86) | 5x Plus's usage | Launched 2026-04-09, an unmistakable answer to Claude Max 5x; beefed-up Codex | Same August 16 quota cloud hangs over this too |
| Anthropic | Max 5x ($100 · ~€86) | 5x Pro | A community case measured ~$1,850 of API-equivalent usage in 30 days (single case); has a real mobile app | Expensive; unclear whether the boost survives past 8/31 |
| AI Ultra base tier ($99.99 · ~€86) | CLI 2,000 requests/day | Cut down from $249.99 at I/O 2026 | Reputation still hasn't recovered | |
| DeepSeek | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| GitHub Copilot | Pro+ ($39 · ~€33) / Max ($100) | $70 / $200 in credits | Deep GitHub integration | The credit pool is finite |
| opencode | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Cursor | Pro+ ($60 · ~€51) | Bigger fixed quota | Good IDE experience | Billing rules change often |
| Windsurf | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Kiro | Pro+ ($40 · ~€34) / Pro Max ($100) | Bigger credits | n/a | Not much of a loyal following |
| Trae | Pro+ ($30 · ~€26) / Ultra ($100) | High-end quota | Cheap way to buy volume | Locked to the Trae IDE |
| Augment | Developer ($50 · ~€43) | 600 messages/month | Enterprise-grade indexing | Billed per message |
| GLM (Zhipu) | Pro ($80, $56 if billed annually · ~€68) | 60,000 credits/week | The poster child for Chinese-vendor value | Data leaves the country, peak-hour speed |
| MiniMax | Max ($50 · ~€43) / Max HS ($80) | 1,000 prompts/5h | High volume (HS is even faster) | Model ceiling |
| Kimi | Allegro (¥699 ≈ $97 · ~€83) | K3 + 1M context | Flagship for long Chinese-language documents | Ecosystem skews toward Chinese-language users |
| Qwen (Alibaba) | Pro (¥499 ≈ $70 · ~€60) | 12,000 credits/5h | Generous quota | Same history of shifting rules |
This tier is now a two-horse race. OpenAI filled the $100 gap on April 9 with Pro (5x Plus's usage), aimed squarely at Claude Max 5x. But if it's my own money, I'm still buying Max 5x. That $1,850 figure is a single community case, not a guarantee for everyone, but even cut in half it still blows past the $100 ticket price. The underrated win here is the phone app: sitting on the couch, having AI edit code. I genuinely can't go back to not having that. No Chinese vendor, however cheap, has matched it yet. Want to save money instead? GLM Pro ($80, $56 if you go annual) makes a solid runner-up.
Stuck at a $50 ceiling? MiniMax Max has the biggest quota. Rolling this out company-wide? Go look at each vendor's Team plan, which this article doesn't cover.
$200: the priciest tier, let's do the math first
| Company | Plan (monthly) | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | ChatGPT Pro ($200) | Cloud Codex + every model + full multimodal |
| Anthropic | Max 20x ($200) | 20x Pro's quota |
| AI Ultra 20x ($200) | Top-spec Ultra | |
| DeepSeek | n/a | n/a |
| GitHub Copilot | n/a | n/a |
| opencode | n/a | n/a |
| Cursor | Ultra ($200) | Top of its ecosystem |
| Windsurf | Max ($200) | Top of its ecosystem |
| Kiro | Power ($200) | Top of its ecosystem |
| Trae | n/a | n/a |
| Augment | n/a | n/a |
| GLM (Zhipu) | Max ($168, $117.6 if billed annually) | 140,000 credits/week |
| MiniMax | n/a | n/a |
| Kimi | n/a | n/a |
| Qwen (Alibaba) | n/a | n/a |
Aside: Devin, the fully autonomous agent, starts at $500/month, the spend-till-it-hurts ceiling. Not in the table above.
Let me do the math before I steer you wrong. Two $100 plans don't add up to one $200 plan's worth of quota: buy two Claude Max 5x subscriptions and you get two separate 5x allowances, not a stacked 10x, and quota never carries across vendors anyway. Claude's 20x plan also has a catch the community dug up a while back: paying double mostly buys burst capacity inside the 5-hour window, roughly 4x, while your weekly budget doesn't scale up by that same 4x. Going by the reference ranges Anthropic itself published in 2025, Max 20x's weekly hours run only about 1.6 to 1.7 times those of 5x (240–480 hours vs. 140–280 hours for Sonnet; Anthropic no longer publishes fixed hour counts, but the underlying structure, a 5-hour session plus a weekly total, hasn't changed). So 20x really suits someone who needs to sprint hard in a short window. If you're heavy but steady across the whole week, this $200 plan is worse value than it looks.
I run two $100 plans myself, Claude Max 5x plus ChatGPT's $100 Pro, a matching pair. I'm not buying maximum volume, I'm buying redundancy. When something like the August 16 episode happens (quota changes, a model gets dumber, an outage), I switch to the other one and keep working. A $200 plan buys you capacity; two $100 plans buy you a backup when one vendor has a bad day. Which one makes sense for you depends on how much that scares you. It scares me.
There's no single winner at this tier: it depends on what you're optimizing for. Need to burst hard inside a 5-hour window? That vendor's 20x plan is enough. Everyone else is better off with two $100 plans.
The benchmark check: Artificial Analysis, and only Artificial Analysis
For facts about which model is actually stronger, I trust Artificial Analysis alone, not some third-party mirror site's reprinted numbers.
Full disclosure: when I wrote this piece in August, I never saved the official page. I later found out the comparison table I'd been working from was actually a mirror site's converted figures, which don't line up with Artificial Analysis's own scale, so I'm not listing any precise scores here anymore. Better no number than a wrong one.
For current rankings, go straight to the official Artificial Analysis page. For a full comparison table (Claude, GPT, GLM, DeepSeek, and Gemini's Intelligence Index scores and API pricing, as of 2026-09-27), see the benchmark section of Claude vs. Codex Quota War (September 2026).
Same thesis as always: benchmarks are the ceiling; quota is your daily life. Every pick above weighs spec, quota, and actual daily use together; I'm not just handing the crown to whoever tops a leaderboard.
The 4 mistakes people keep making when picking a plan
- Paying annually. Quotas can change overnight (see August 16), and an annual plan means you've pre-sold your right to jump ship. Exception: when the annual discount is as steep as GLM's (30% off), it's cheap enough you won't mind staying put.
- Buying on benchmarks alone. A high score attached to a stingy quota still feels bad every single day.
- Overestimating your own usage. Run the free tier or the cheapest plan for a week or two before upgrading. From what I've seen, most light users can't even burn through a $20 plan's quota.
- Betting everything on one vendor. Heavy users: go re-read the math in the $200 section.
FAQ
Q: I don't code at all. Give me the 30-second version. Free → DeepSeek (strongest model) or Gemini (try the YouTube summary trick); $8 → ChatGPT Go; $20 → ChatGPT Plus. You never have to touch a coding tool.
Q: The 30-second version for people who code? $0 → opencode + Ollama; $10 → opencode Go; $20 → Claude Pro; $100 → Claude Max 5x; $200 → either go all-in on 20x or split across two $100 plans; see the trade-off above.
Q: Can I trust the Chinese vendors (DeepSeek/GLM/MiniMax/Kimi/Qwen)? The value for money is genuinely good, and DeepSeek's free tier is almost absurd. But think through two things first: your data sits on offshore servers and your input may get used for training (check with your employer before pointing it at company work), and the cheap tiers can change the rules fast: Qwen killed its free CLI without warning (confirmed 2026-04-15). Fine for personal side projects. Stop before you feed it anything confidential.
Q: Is this sponsored content? Ha, no, the ad slot's still empty. OpenAI took the $20 crown, Anthropic took the $100 one, DeepSeek and Gemini got the praise in the free tier, opencode and GLM got it in the budget tier. Every fanbase has something to be mad about; that's about as fair as I know how to be.
Quotas and prices move fast. Everything here was checked on 2026-08-22; I'll come back and update if anything major changes.
Sources (checked 2026-08-22)
All prices and quotas in the tables above come from official pricing pages plus the sources below:
- codingplan.org: tracker for 20+ coding plans (updated 2026-08-19)
- XenoSpectrum: Codex weekly-quota reports (Reddit r/codex) and the NerfTrack estimate (2026-08-16)
- codersera: DeepSeek V4 Pro/Flash GA and pricing (GA 2026-08-13)
- TechCrunch: ChatGPT launches the $100 Pro plan (2026-04-09)
- Zenken AI: ChatGPT plan limits (2026-08-04)
- explainx: Claude usage-limit timeline (doubled 2026-05-06; +50% through Aug 31)
- DataStudios: Gemini free-tier features and limits (2026-03)
- morphllm: weekly-hour ranges for Claude plans (2025 published reference figures; no longer officially published as fixed numbers)
- morphllm: real monthly AI coding spend ($1,850 API-equivalent single case)
- Artificial Analysis: official model page (checked 2026-10-01)
- usagebox: GitHub Copilot's move to AI Credits (effective 2026-06-01)
- Tembo: Gemini CLI's free route ends, Antigravity quotas (change of 2026-06-18)
- inventivehq: record of Qwen's free CLI shutdown (ended 2026-04-15)
- CloudZero: Windsurf (Devin Desktop) pricing
- The Register: the AWS Kiro pricing controversy (2025-08-18)
- z.ai: official GLM Coding Plan pricing page (checked 2026-10-01)
- KDnuggets: opencode + Ollama + Qwen3-Coder hands-on
- Devin: pricing for the fully autonomous agent